For years, network administrators have been plagued by the issue of unauthorized users (hackers) who gain entry to the network by probing for weaknesses or misrepresenting their intentions when asking to use certain network services, such as asking for a network user to read an email message. As such, it can be appreciated that anti hacker security system have been in use for years. Typically, anti hacker security systems are comprised of information security (INFOSEC) appliances that protect computers and computer-based networks against attacks from hackers. These appliances are typically sold as point-solutions and countermeasures ranging from Firewalls (FW), virtual private networks (VPNS) AntiVirus Servers (AVS), Anti Distributed Denial of Service (Anti-DDoS), Certificate Authorities (CA), Content Filtering and Application Caching (PROXY), Encryption Acceleration and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), Vulnerability Assessment (VA), Vulnerability Remediation (VR), and Wireless Security (802.11lb) using Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) some of which may or may not be deployed with Clustering and High Availability (HA) features with Hardened Operating Systems (HOS) and well thought out and customer tested Human Factors in Design (HFID).
The main problem with conventional anti hacker security system are they are not designed to stop hackers, instead they are countermeasures that react to threats. Thus, today's security systems still leave the network vulnerable to attack, although they are capable of addressing certain attacks once the attack is identified.
Another problem with conventional anti hacker security systems is that they are typically built as proprietary systems, resulting in long design, development and release cycles. This of course can be problematic as hackers release new attacks quite frequently, and because of the Internet, these many of today's attacks spread with breathtaking speed from one network to another. In a world where attacks can spread from Asia to North America in a matter of days, it is important that security measures be deployed as quickly as possible. It is also important that the INFOSEC security measures be designed to scale more easily so that improvements in central processing unit (CPU) power, memory and storage can be made available on a regular basis. Unfortunately, most of today's INFOSEC solutions are hard to upgrade and manage. For example, many of today's INFOSEC appliances have been “hard wired” with a CPU, and thus over time will be able to keep up with user demand. In fact, many INFOSEC systems today are “hard wired” with one or more network adapter interface for a 10 megabits per second network and if the network performance requirements move to 100 megabits per second or a gigabit per second, these INFOSEC appliances become bottlenecks to network performance and therefore detract from user productivity. Still another problem with conventional anti hacker security system are that each INFOSEC appliance has a completely different and unique administrative interface. After deploying more than a few of these appliances, it becomes extremely difficult for System Administrators (SYSADMINs) to manage these systems.
Thus, there is a need for improved security systems.